Subterranean Old Sac blues
Hundreds turned away when allotted tour tickets run out
Origin Edie Lau Bee Staff Writer
Publication Date 9/3/2006
Page B1
Section METRO
Edition METRO FINAL
As the coordinator of walking tours in Old Sacramento, Janessa Gonsalves wondered whether folks might want to see original underground sections of the historic district.
Saturday morning, she got her answer.
People lined up by the hundreds outside the Old Sacramento Visitors Center, hoping to score free tickets to a first-ever tour of Old Town as it existed before floodwaters compelled Sacramento to build itself higher.
Roughly two out of three people had to be turned away after the 288 tickets allotted for nine afternoon tours were nabbed within 25 minutes.
"We want this to be a safe, enjoyable tour," said Gonsalves, trying not to be defensive after having told one irate person after another why she couldn't make more tickets available immediately.
"We know what we can handle. We're not going to stretch beyond our limits."
The underground tours are offered as part of Gold Rush Days. The weekend celebration of California history transforms Old Sac into a facsimile of its old 1850s self, complete with dusty dirt roads, horse-drawn wagons, men dressed in cavalry garb and women in hoop skirts and sunbonnets.
Festival visitors get to do such things as pan for "gold," which they exchange for scrip. The scrip entitles them to try other Gold Rush-era activities, including making dolls out of fabric and string, and playing gambling games.
"It's kind of an educational thing," said Mack Porterfield, a docent dressed in suspenders and a straw hat who oversaw one gold-panning station Saturday. "Although, quite frankly, the adults get more of a kick out of it than the kids do."
The allure of underground tours is what drew many to the festival.
Connie Thompson, her 11-year-old son, Justin, and her mother, Premila Yappert, left their homes in Placerville and El Dorado about 8:30 in the morning hoping for a chance at tickets.
They didn't have a clue what they might see underground. "It just sounded cool," said Thompson eagerly. "You don't get to see history like that very often."
Nor would they see history like that Saturday. They were among the unlucky ones turned away.
A second round of tours is being held this afternoon, but tickets to those won't be released until this morning.
"I don't know if we'll come back," Thompson said with a grimace. "It's a pain."
Gonsalves, who works for the Historic Old Sacramento Foundation, said she is considering adding the underground tour next year to the foundation's regular roster of paid tours.
Those cost $7 for adults, $5 for seniors and are free for children 12 and younger.
Judging from the reaction of at least one wannabe tour patron, the prospect of having to buy a ticket would not be a deterrent.
"I would so be willing to pay, especially if it would help keep it preserved," said Laura Teague, who ventured to Old Sacramento with friend Sara Vining, only to discover that the day's tickets were all gone. Teague and Vining saw a program on public television a few years ago about subterranean Old Sac and have wanted to see it for themselves ever since.
The district's underground began taking shape in 1863, when city fathers, weary of being flooded time and again, undertook the difficult job of raising the streets 10 to 12 feet.
The elevating of Old Sacramento, which took years, created new dirt-floor basements under buildings and hollow spaces under sidewalks. Many of those brick-lined spaces and passages exist still, and some of them comprise the tour.
Tessa Murphy, a 12-year-old from Davis who took the tour with her mother, Jennifer Gray, and friends, said it was not quite what she had expected.
"I pictured that it was just going to be, like, tunnels," Tessa said. "When we first got in, it was a big room. There was a tunnel, but it wasn't a skinny tunnel or anything, and it just came to a dead end."
But she was not disappointed. "I'm, like, really interested in history and stuff," she said. "It was cool to imagine being someone from a long time ago being down there, and imagine it being daylight down there instead of electrical light, before they filled it in."
Paul Hammond, director of public programming at the California State Railroad Museum, which partnered with the Historic Old Sacramento Foundation to organize the tours, said public interest in historic neighborhoods only recently has been great enough to create a draw for something like the underground tours.
"When Old Sacramento was redeveloped (in the 1970s), it wasn't cool to be old," Hammond said.
Recent public awareness of flood dangers has heightened the interest, he said. "In this area, flooding has taken on additional morbid fascination."
IF YOU GO
What: Gold Rush Days tours of underground Old Sacramento.
When: Today.
Who: Nine groups of 32 will depart every 15 minutes between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. Tours last 45 minutes.
Tickets: Free, but must be obtained in advance beginning at 10 a.m.
Where: Old Sacramento Visitors Center, 1002 Second St.
Tip: Arrive early. Saturday's tickets were gone in 25 minutes.
The Bee's Edie Lau can be reached at (916) 321-1098 or elau@sacbee.com.
Underground tour reveals city history
OLD SACRAMENTO SITES OPEN TO PUBLIC
Origin Gina Kim gkim@sacbee.com
Publication Date 7/11/2010
Page B3
Section OUR REGION
Edition METRO FINAL
Paris has its catacombs. Guanajuato in Mexico has its 2-mile-long tunneled street Calle Miguel Hidalgo. And Sacramento has its underground -- the Gold Rush-era sidewalks and ground floors built before the entire city was raised more than 10 feet in the 1860s and 1870s to protect it from flooding.
Long entombed by asphalt, concrete and new construction, Sacramento's subterranean level opened to the public Saturday with tours organized by the Historic Old Sacramento Foundation.
"We were the city that shouldn't have existed," tour guide Jessica Mayhew told the inaugural group to duck below earth. "But because of the indomitable nature of its people, (Sacramento) survived."
The hourlong tours begin at the Sacramento History Museum, where each ticketholder is given an emerald-green hard hat and outfitted with a headset that picks up the tidbits of history being shared by the tour guides.
It rained 2 feet in two months that winter of 1861, turning streets into rivers and attics into bedrooms. A milelong section of Sacramento remained underwater for months. Gov. Leland Stanford had to take a rowboat to his 1862 inauguration.
City leaders decided to erect brick walls on either side of the streets, and the area in between was filled with gravel and dirt hauled from what is now Sutter's Landing Park at 28th and C streets.
Wooden sidewalks were built on either side of the elevated streets, and property owners were tasked with figuring out how to link their buildings to the new thoroughfares.
Some lifted their buildings with jack screws. Others turned first floors into basements and began operating out of second floors. A few came and went via ladders.
While some of the 13 tour guides lead straightforward treks into the hollows of two Old Sacramento buildings, others dress in the bonnets and petticoats of the time and offer entertaining accents and historical tales starkly contrasting the modern microphones pinned to their lapels.
Buoyed by a $185,000 loan from the Sacramento City Council, the historical foundation spent a year building walkways and ramps, installing lighting and photographs, and researching the city's raising of 2 1/2 square miles of streets and buildings, said executive director Marcia Eymann.
The group hopes to add more historic buildings to the tour if additional property owners agree to provide access, Eymann said.
Public interest in the underground tours -- similar to ones in Seattle and Portland, Ore. -- peaked when two out of three people were turned away for similar tours that were part of Gold Rush Days in 2006.
Now, the tours will be a permanent fixture of Old Sacramento, Eymann said. All of Saturday's tours were sold out days in advance.
When asked her favorite part of the tour, 7-year-old Christina Bumb of Elk Grove replied: "I liked it all. I just can't pick."
IF YOU GO
What: Underground tours in Old Sacramento.
When: The hourlong tours run every half-hour starting at 11 a.m. Thursday through Sunday. Tours end at 3 p.m. on Thursday and Friday and 5 p.m. on weekends.
Where: Begin at Sacramento History Museum, 101 I St.
Cost: Adult tickets, $15; children ages 6-17, $10.
Information: (916) 808-7059 or
www.historicoldsac.org.
Call The Bee's Gina Kim, (916) 321-1228.
Going Underground
Gold Rush Days offer a rare look beneath city streets
Origin Dixie Reid Bee Staff Writer
Publication Date 9/1/2006
Page TK14
Section TICKET
Edition METRO FINAL
The weather was just awful that winter, when it rained and rained and rained some more. On Jan. 8, 1850, raging river water poured into Sacramento's Embarcadero district, now known as Old Sacramento.
It tore down the streets and tore up the sidewalks. Merchants watched helplessly as the fury washed away their goods, and numerous tent structures were likewise swept away, along with anyone inside. The death toll was high.
The citizenry reacted in the oddest manner. "Throughout the inundation, the city seemed almost mad with boisterous frolic," Dr. John Morse wrote in his 1850 history of Sacramento.
The locals eventually pulled themselves together and rebuilt the town, only to be flooded out every few years (and to be ravaged by fires, as well.) By 1862, they were fed up, and city fathers began the arduous task of raising the streets 10 to 12 feet.
That created an oddity known today as the "hollow sidewalk." It's possible, in certain parts of Old Sacramento, to walk far beneath the existing boardwalk on what was the street level prior to 1862.
During this weekend's seventh annual Gold Rush Days in Old Sacramento, the public will have a chance to do just that.
And so, in addition to the mid-19th- century dirt streets, horse-drawn wagons, gunfighters, gamblers, Pony Express re-enactments -- and permanent installation of the Transcontinental Railroad's "lost" gold spike at the California State Railroad Museum -- the Historic Old Sacramento Foundation is conducting guided "underground" tours.
The free, 45-minute walking tours are available between 4 and 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday only. Reservations are necessary and must be made in person at the Old Sacramento Visitors Center, 1002 Second St. (near J Street), after 10 a.m. the day you wish to go.
Sites on the tour range from the parklike well behind the Eagle Theatre, so low-lying that it's difficult to see the nearby Sacramento River, to the low- lying Atlantis Park, with its graveyard aura, where a building once stood.
The highlight of the tour is the B.F. Hastings building at Second and J streets, which once housed the California Supreme Court and the office of Theodore Judah, the civil engineer who successfully routed the transcontinental railroad through the Sierra Nevada. It also was the terminus of the Pony Express.
From the basement, visitors will be able to step over a low brick abutment into the hollow sidewalk and follow the dirt path -- the original street level -- a few yards beneath the J Street boardwalk and turn the corner under Second Street.
"Store owners had one actual charge in 1862," says Janessa Gonsalves, historic education program coordinator for the foundation. "They were to build a cofferdam wall in front of their store 10 to 12 feet high, and the proprietor on the other side of the street was to do the same. And between the two cofferdam walls, the city filled in with debris, rock, dirt, whatever they could get."
The brick cofferdam walls built alongside the B.F. Hastings building, easily viewed during the underground tour, are starting to melt away. They've been safely reinforced with modern concrete.
The tour includes a stop at Fulton's Prime Rib, 900 2nd St., where the hollow sidewalks are now glassed-in dining areas. The building was not elevated after the 19th century street work.
Most merchants either raised their buildings with jack screws or converted the first floor into a basement and operated out of the second floor, now at street level. Those who made no structural changes, whose front door now faced a brick wall, simply came and went via a ladder descending from the street.
"There are stories of little old ladies and children falling down, going shop to shop," says Gonsalves. "Some people chose to remain in their building while they were being jacked up, and that did not go well in some cases. There was a particular boarding house that, during the night, tipped over with its occupants still in bed."
There is no tunnel system, per se, throughout Old Sacramento, says Paul Hammond, director of public programming for both the California State Railroad Museum and Old Sacramento State Historic Park. The tunnels simply circle some blocks and many were walled off in the 1970s because of vagrancy.
Merchants and building owners in mid-19th-century Sacramento were faced with expensive and troublesome work to avoid being flooded out every few years, even as river levees were being built.
"Consider the alternative: They could just move the city, and they actually did consider that," says Hammond. "(Old Sacramento) is the practical head of navigation on the Sacramento River. This is where the gold-seekers were coming, and it was a logical place to do business. If you move the city, then probably business is going somewhere else, so the business owners have to spend the money. They've got established businesses that keep burning and flooding, and they decided it was in their best interest to spend the money."
"Those who didn't, did not survive," says Gonsalves.
"They were mandated," says Hammond. "If they didn't go along with the program, they had to leave. There were some false starts to the process. As early as the mid-1850s, they think, 'Oh, we can raise the city three or four feet and that will be enough. And, of course, there was a bigger flood."
Gold Rush Days
WHAT: Old Sacramento State Historic Park revisits the 1850s.
WHEN: Opening today, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. (an old-time parade starts at 9:30 a.m. at Ninth and I streets and follows I Street to the Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento), and continuing 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, and 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday.
WHERE: Old Sacramento
COST: Free
INFORMATION: (916) 808-7777, www.discovergold.org
The Bee's Dixie Reid can be reached at (916) 321-1134 or dreid@sacbee.com.
OLD SACRAMENTO
Tour digs deep into city's roots
IN MAY, STEP UNDERGROUND, REVISIT THE GOLD RUSH ERA
Origin Loretta Kalb lkalb@sacbee.com
Publication Date 1/21/2010
Page B1
Section OUR REGION
Edition METRO FINAL
It's a little-known Sacramento historical venue.
But starting in mid-May, the Historic Old Sacramento Foundation plans to reacquaint the public with underground passages there that once served the city's Gold Rush-era population.
Over the next month, the foundation plans to recruit theatrical guides who will be immersed in the tunnels' history and share the past through costume, language and dramatic stories.
On Tuesday night, the Sacramento City Council authorized a $185,000 loan to the foundation for startup costs.
The venue will be at Old Sacramento's original street level before buildings were hoisted 10 to 15 feet in the mid-1860s to escape flooding.
At a preview tour Wednesday, the air below ground was a tad musty and humid as rain pounded overhead.
The brickwork forming archways and bulkheads still evokes a era more than 140 years past in the space beneath the B.F. Hastings Building at Second and J streets.
In those days, steady rain would raise the level of the Sacramento River to the street. Levees of the day were easily overtopped. So the city often turned into a lake when the river rose.
Bad flooding hit in 1861, said historian and foundation researcher Heather Downey, a graduate student at California State University, Sacramento.
It began raining in December that year and "just kept raining through January," said Downey. "It's a very appropriate day to be doing this," she said Wednesday.
Downey is pursing a master's degree in history. Her thesis will include creating an interpretive plan for the underground tours. The aim: give visitors a greater understanding of the history of the area.
On Wednesday, Downey joined the foundation's Marcia Eymann, history manager for the Center for Sacramento History, and Paul Hammond, museum director for the California State Parks' Sacramento History and Railroad Sector, as they described how the buildings were elevated.
The task was daunting, Hammond explained.
Retaining walls were built first along the perimeters of the buildings and the adjacent street levels were raised, he said. Buildings were hoisted next. Then came the sidewalks.
What remains below today is a network of tunnels that crisscrosses beneath Old Sacramento's wooden sidewalks linked to former basements that gave merchants additional operating space in the latter half of the 19th century.
Some areas are impassable. But others, such as the tunnel wrapping much of the Hastings building and the nearby Hall Luhrs Building at the alleyway between I and J streets, will be part of the walking tour.
In some places, the brick bulkheads are tiring and reinforcing buttresses are deteriorating.
"Those bricks were made in the 19th century," Eymann said. "Brick-making then wasn't what it is today."
These days, some old loose bricks in the area can be crushed by hand, she said.
Below-ground tours have been talked about for years, Eymann said.
In 2006, limited tours sold out quickly.
Today most visitors to Old Sacramento know the area above ground. The western terminus of the Pony Express is there along with the old California Supreme Court chambers.
The above-ground tour will be part of the overall experience, organizers said.
Tours of 45 minutes to an hour will be held weekends initially and may be expanded if there is sufficient demand.
Cost will be $17.50 for adults and $12.50 for children.
Those interested in volunteering to help with tours or becoming a guide can call (916) 808-7973.
Call The Bee's Loretta Kalb, (916) 321-1073.